Boss Cow is Back, 7.5 Inches of Rain, Goats for Sale, Growing Pigs, Heat Tolerant Chickens & More

Besides what’s happening on our farm lately, in this blog, I’m also diving into a bit about why beef prices are so historically high and how that affects a small farm like ours and pricing for you, our customers.

As I have mentioned many times recently, cattle and beef prices are at record highs and because we don’t have a mama cow herd, we can’t escape the effects of that, even though we raise beef ourselves.

A big reason prices are up so much is from lag affects from recent droughts in the Great Plains and Western U.S.

Starting in 2020 and really through the present, drought conditions have led to less forage for grazing, farmers not being able to make hay for winter and many farms liquidating their herds and retiring in the face of those high costs to import hay and feed.

The total U.S. beef herd size is now the smallest its been since 1951! And it takes time to build that back up, even if drought conditions start to improve.

Reduced imports because of New World screw worm concerns in Mexico and tariffs on Brazil have also impacted beef prices at the grocery store.

Unlike pigs or goats or chickens, the commodity cattle market prices do affect the price for small farms like ours to buy weaned steers to finish for beef. Small cattle breeders are used to setting their prices by the auction market prices (that go off of commodity pricing) rather than their real input costs. They are of course happy to take a higher price when the market is down, but they aren’t going to take a lower price, even if their costs haven’t increased, if the market is up.

Cattle prices are almost like land values. Determined by “the market” and appraisals and all sorts of national and global factors.

All that said, typically for farms like ours without a ton of capital to invest up front, finishing steers on grass makes the most sense financially versus starting a breeding herd.

To have a breeding herd, you need to invest in cows or heifers that won’t produce calves for 10 months if they’re bred when you buy them or even longer if they’re not bred.

Then you need to grow their male calves for a minimum of 18 months, usually closer to 30 months. Female calves take even longer to reach butcher weight and usually it makes sense to keep them back as future mama cows to continue to build the herd up for the long term.

So for years, we have been buying steers to finish from other farms as well as cull cows, that is cows that the farmer doesn’t want to breed again for some reason or just wants to sell for whatever reason.

A few of our cull cows have had calves, which is a nice bonus. A year ago our big boss white cow had a beautiful steer. And she has kept her conditioning so well that we evaluated her teeth and overall health and decided to keep her!

We can’t go out and buy premium mama cows or heifers from super promising genetics right now, but we can start our breeding herd incrementally finding the diamonds in the rough.

And we’re incredibly lucky to have a neighbor friend who has been raising beef on the side for most of his life. So our big boss cow went into his herd for a few months to be bred by his bull. She just came back last week and settled right back into the herd. If she settled the first time she was bred, we could have another calf from her in March!

The rest of the cattle are absolutely beautiful and just have a few rotations left before we finally take some more in to the processor for beef. They’re in our house field this week, so I am enjoying watching them graze (and nap) through the windows all the time and am preparing to say my goodbyes and my thank yous to the steers about to leave us become beef. In some ways, it never becomes easier and I don’t necessarily think it should.

We had an absolute ditch (and pond) filler of a rainstorm last week, with 7.5 inches of rain in just a few hours overnight. I was shocked to look at the rain gauge in the morning!

But despite lots of rain in our region lately, we somehow kept missing most of the pop up storms, so the ditches and ponds were completely empty and we didn’t really mind the rain.

Of course, 7.5 inches over a longer period of time so it can soak in better than just run off would be nice, but we’ll take what we can get.

Someone recently commented on an old Instagram photo from 2019 and looking at the photo was wild, so I decided to include it. It shows our Dominique hens and Khaki Campbell ducks around one of our ponds. You can compare that to the photo right before it, of that same pond currently, with some Muscovy ducks peaking out of the edges.

You can see we had just stuck some willow cuttings in the ground back in 2019 and now they’re massive, maybe 20 feet tall or so!

Another exciting thing lately has been the our local electrical COOP has crews trimming trees and branches along the power lines. That’s always a relief in the middle of hurricane season, but they also are dumping all the wood chips on the farm, a wonderful source of free carbon we can use for bedding, composting, filling low areas, etc.

The goats are also continuing to live their best lives, making their rotations through our main pastures. As of Monday, they reached the woodier end of the property with even more primo goat food.

Knock on wood, there have been no buck escapes this year and we castrated all the bucklings, so we actually get to determine WHEN kidding season is for once, how long it will last and who is being bred. It is time to retire a few of our oldest girls and I am also looking forward to keeping several of this year’s doelings as future mamas, but some of them I may hold back from breeding until next year so they can mature and get a little bigger first.

That said, we do have 10-15 doelings born in November, February and May that are available for sale as pets or breeders. For the November group, I made a full blog post with individual pictures of each doe at birth and currently, along with their lineage.

But everyone who ended up buying goats just deferred to me on my recommendations so I’m not sure it makes sense to do all that detail work again!

Needless to say, there’s a variety of colors, markings and parentage.

Our herd is mainly Kiko, with some Boer and Myotonic mixed in early on for hybrid vigor, body composition and parasite resistance.

We also have a line with some Oberhasli and Saanen dairy genetics from Miss Heidi (in the selfie with me above). She has had four daughters and three granddaughters who have kidded, so her line continues to grow.

This is a fantastic group of pigs we’re raising right now. Everything was fairly smooth with them since they were born in April and even though two out of three of their moms are a little high strung, they are chill and have wonderful temperaments.

I’m currently evaluating the best gilts to keep back as future breeders themselves.

Since they moved out of our house field where the farrowing barn is in June, they worked their way along a tree line from the goat hoophouse to our old tiny house.

Once they reached the end of that tree line, Cade and Grant loaded them into our hog trailer (a trailer that has hydraulics to drop to ground level, making it very easy for hogs to walk in and not have to jump up) and moved them to another woods section around the corner.

There were lots of nice full wallows (almost like ponds with tadpoles and everything!) in the first of the four rotations, but even after the 7.5 inches of rain, the second grid was surprisingly dry! So a lot of these pictures are from me hosing them off and letting them form new wallows on Sunday.

The breeder pigs are still working their big section next to our house and they definitely are curious about the cattle when they moved in right next to them!

After the cattle cycle through and then the goats come through next week, we’ll likely shift them to the woody section in this field on the other side of the farrowing barn for a few weeks, then take them to another section and let that rest and bring them back in late September, in time for having more piglets as early as the beginning of October.

The chickens are doing so well despite the blazing heat. Although it was so frustrating and demoralizing to be dealing with so many predator issues this fall, winter and spring, smaller flock sizes for Flocks 1 and 2 have taken the shade pressure off a bit.

Usually we need to get a second trailer or shade structure out to each flock in the summer, but the shade from the coops has been enough for the number of birds in Flocks 1 and 2.

And the way we’re doing our cattle rotations now, we have been able to devote the shade structure we often use for them entirely for Flock 3 this summer, which has worked out really well.

The Barred Rock breeding flock is doing great, too, as are their offspring in the brooder and in the hoophouse. And a new batch of eggs just started hatching in the incubator while we started holding back the next round of eggs to load up in the incubator once these chicks have all hatched and moved out.

At this point in the summer, my garden is tall and lush but full of bugs, some friends, some foes!

I found a very cool Lynx spider on my basil. They don’t even really make webs, just tend to live on plants hunting bugs. Unfortunately, that does include pollinators, but circle of life, right?

There was also a beautiful Obscure Bird Grasshopper in my roselle hibiscus. It could totally eat the leaves, but nothing else is really bothering the roselle, so oh well. Too cool looking to remove.

There’s been tons of dragonflies around, too and plenty of moths and butterflies on the zinnias and bumbles on the sunflowers.

And finally, Grant has been plugging away keep fields mowed after the cattle and goats cycle through and then seeding milo and beans as cover crops.

He also is working on a big fall garden plot by the ponds. Our friend Becky who now has Northshore Greens Farm did a trial market garden in this spot in 2017 and 2018 and there’s been crab compost and sunflower and corn patches intermittently since then, but now we’re going to make new rows that drain into the pond instead of perpendicular to it and do a big fall garden.

Bonus picture of Princess Pearl the cat, the best egg washing assistant!